Horror of losing yourself to another human being

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 7, 2004

One of the great appeals of memoir is the opportunity to read about someone else's challenging and humiliating experiences in order to feel better about our own: I haven't done the dishes in three days, but look! She went to rehab!

But with the rise of self-help reality television, the personal essay has taken on a new dimension, demonstrating not just how difficult a life has been, but also that it's possible to solve any problem over time and perhaps by simply reading the book (or watching the talk show), one can avoid the problem in the first place.

And so Caroline Kraus' "Borderlines" occasionally reads like a paper version of "Dr. Phil": Here's this woman with so much going for her! Why can't she get it together? I'll tell you why, and I will fix it! Most psychiatric professionals would say (and Kraus would probably agree) that no problem can be fixed until it is 1) identified, and 2) the sufferer is ready to fix it. But this book seems to posit that if we can just see the warning signs beforehand, we'll never need fixing at all.

Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Kraus writes with cinematic assurance and flair. She sets it all up perfectly: Raised upper middle class with a supportive family, her world comes crashing down after her mom loses a long battle with cancer. This sorrow spurs a move to San Francisco, where she meets Jane, a woman of magnetic attraction who also happens to suffer from borderline personality disorder. Jane starts off as tons of fun (and provides the love Kraus craves) but eventually sinks her claws into the emotionally wrecked author with a vengeance: draining Kraus' inheritance, demanding attention at all times, cutting her off from friends and family, and threatening physical violence -- all of which causes Kraus to develop a scary habit of smacking her own head repeatedly with a field hockey stick.

Of the night she first started hitting herself -- a reaction to Jane's fury that Kraus had come home late -- she writes, "Something toxic was boiling in me ... I kicked the wall, then pounded it. I threw what I could find and screamed. Then, behind my door, I spotted my field hockey stick. Bracing myself with one hand against the wall, I held my breath and threw it against my forehead, right at the hairline, over and over again ... I stood dazed for a moment, then the acid came out of me. Time passed. My thoughts slowed and then stopped. A trickle of blood headed for my eye, and I blocked it with my finger." Great stuff, but it's all too often interrupted with passages that do little but stall for time. On her first day in San Francisco: "I had no attachment to restrain me, no expectations to reward. Nobody was watching. Like a boat slipping unnoticed from its dock, I set off down the street, unmoored."

Kraus gets trapped in this rhythm of bridging gaps between story details with "deep" lines that take away the fun of trying to figure out the significance of things ourselves. It's as though she doesn't trust the reader to get it.

How anyone could allow themselves to be completely destroyed by another human being is a mystifying story. But what's so frustrating about "Borderlines" is the way Kraus emphatically sorts it all out in the end, favoring dreamy psychobabble over allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. After a few reconstructed visits to a psychiatrist (who, of course, says all the right things), Kraus comes to realize that she has the power to take back her life. And with an alacrity totally absent in the rest of the book, she gets her life back on track.

The details of her extrication are painfully sparse, and there's the sense that once the storm has passed, we are no longer welcome in her life, and she would prefer if we could just move on and look at the next case file now. This denouement is entirely unsatisfying to anyone who might thrive on seeing how a healthy, better-adjusted Caroline Kraus spends her days. We've lived through all of the bad, and we've earned a chance to see the good, too.

"Before meeting Jane," she writes toward the end of the book, "I had never imagined I could be drawn so fully into another person's troubled depths that I too became unhinged. Only by going back have I found that the seeds were planted long before I met Jane, just as her troubles took root long before she knew my name." This is pop psychology at its most ingratiating, and it certainly might have the ability to help anyone trapped in the shoes of the narrator. But for a casual reader, it's frustrating to have all the answers handed to us, along with our hat at the door. 